


Baptism

by SylvanWitch



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Bathtub Sex, M/M, Religious Imagery & Symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-02-15
Packaged: 2021-02-28 04:27:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22738003
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: Flint comes to Vane in disguise.
Relationships: Captain Flint | James McGraw/Charles Vane
Comments: 4
Kudos: 50





	Baptism

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happens when I draw "Peace be with you" on my own personal prompts bingo card, and the first image that comes to me is of Captain James Flint.

“Peace be with you.”

Startled out of his mid-afternoon half-drunk maunderings, Captain Charles Vane considered the figure before him: dusty brown robe belted with a ragged piece of hempen rope, bare feet, the hollow-eyed, hungry look of a zealot.

“Not interested, Padre,” Vane drawled.

“You aren’t attracted to the peace of Christ?” Though his words were intoned with the usual fervor, the priest’s expression suggested something else. There was in his eyes a steady flame less of piety than of passion.

Vane felt suddenly vulnerable, sitting as he had been in a tilted-back chair against the wall of the Inn, in the shade of the gallery.

His boots struck the packed earth with a thud, and he took his time rising to his feet, which put the priest within arm’s reach, a proximity most men found uncomfortable when Vane wanted them to.

He gave the man a slow, considering once-over, insolent and patently obscene.

The priest snorted inelegantly and shook his head.

“Get thee behind me,” he murmured, but there was a smirk at the edge of his lips that turned his mouth into a promise of sin.

Vane took that to mean he should follow the priest inside.

The interior was dim, the shutters closed against the punishing tropical sun, and the house’s few patrons ceased their talking as the priest walked among them, as though he carried with him a benediction of silence.

Max quirked an eyebrow at him but said nothing as the priest passed her and mounted the stairs to the second floor.

“Planning to save the girls’ souls?” Vane called after the priest as he followed him up.

The padre paused at top of the stairs, the bars of the railing caging his lower body in shadow. A suffuse golden light bathed his face and throat from a window high up on the far end of the hall, setting his hair aflame.

Vane watched that throat bob, watched the eyes, afire from within by some hidden desire, watched the mouth smile inscrutably.

“Not the girls’,” the priest said at last as he moved away from the stairs and toward the far end of the hall.

Vane followed him there, too, into a wide, airy room with a canopied bed against the far wall and a great copper tub large enough for two taking up all the space in the middle.

It was already full.

As the priest reached for his belt to undo it, Vane raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t that one,” –indicating the three filthy knots tied into the rough line—“for chastity?”

“The Lord exhorts us to be clean in body as well as mind and spirit, my son,” the priest answered, dropping the loosened belt as though freeing himself of something weighty.

Then he reached for the bottom hem of his robe and in a fluid, practiced motion stripped it off over his head.

He was wearing nothing beneath it, and the strong, pale lines of his body were almost an assault on Vane’s reeling sensibilities. The priest had broad shoulders peppered in freckles. A line of ruddy hair arrowed down from his belly, pointing the way to a heavy, broad cock nestled in a nest of fiery curls.

There were scars across that chest—cutlass marks—and the angry red pucker of a bullet hole in his shoulder. The bunched muscles of his thighs and the absolute glory of his round, pale ass suggested a man who worked for his wages and had seen some violence in his time—and wrought some too, by the look of him.

When the priest was settled, the water lapping gently around his rosy nipples, he invited Vane to join him with a look.

He wasn’t an easy man to astonish—the things he’d seen and done, the glory of a man-o-war on fire, the sound of cannon-fire and clashing blades breaking the easy peace of morning, the heat of skin and the stench of sweat and spend, the slip of bodies beneath and above him, all these things had Charles Vane experienced.

Yet here he was, hesitating, something in the priest’s eyes holding him back, a look that said the priest wouldn’t be bested, that here was a man more dangerous than any Vane had encountered under the murderous fire of a broadside or in the grim alleys of Nassau or in the stinking hold of a plague ship.

The padre held his hand out, palm up, as if asking alms, and that, at last, broke Vane from his paralysis. With the efficiency of a pirate who knows the value of a quick boarding, he shed his clothes and stepped into the tub opposite the priest, who was leaning back into the oblate curve with his arms stretched out on either rim.

Vane’s legs brushed against the priest’s beneath the water, and a keen edge of want knifed through him.

An effect of the diffuse light in the room, magnified by the shifting glint of the water, splashed copper across the priest’s cheeks and nose. His lips curled into a hungry smile, and he fixed eyes the color of the ocean on Vane.

Something stirred, coiling in Vane’s belly, and he felt out of his depth, unmanned by that direct and avid look.

Because he was the kind of man who confronted what he feared—and because, alas, he had no sword at hand with which to do it—Vane said, “What do you want?” sounding like nothing so much as a captain seeking parley.

It irked him, tickling his pride, and he added, “Because _I_ want to bend you over the edge of this tub and fuck you until you squeal.”

It was the sort of thing he’d say deliberately in front of plantation misses in town or the women he’d encountered aboard a prize ship, the words meant to shock, to suggest that Vane was indifferent to others’ comforts so long as he satisfied his own needs.

The appetite in the priest’s answering smile had everything of the predator and nothing of praying in it, and if it bothered the man of God that Vane was a vulgar, fornicating heathen, he kept it to himself.

Instead, with a grace born of strolling a heaving ship’s deck, the priest rolled to his knees and offered his back in a single, fluid motion.

Not even a drop of water spilled over the edge of the tub.

Vane was not so graceful in traversing the space between them, displacing water as he went, careless of the mess. His was the progress of conquest, and there was nothing subtle in it.

For his part, the priest showed him his teeth over his shoulder, a look that suggested that it would be Vane who was ultimately subdued, no matter who was in the ascendant position.

It was a risk Vane was willing to take.

Already hard, Vane pressed himself against the priest, his cock fitting nicely into the seam of his ass. Despite Vane’s weight draped over his back, the priest spread his thighs, making a better channel for Vane.

Chuckling, Vane rasped, “You’re eager for it,” and the priest murmured, “Always, my son,” and rocked against Vane’s cock, wringing a gasp out of them both.

Soap of the oily variety preferred by prostitutes and their patrons, spicy scent heavy on the back of the tongue, sat on a stool within easy reach of the tub. Vane used it to slick his fingers and slide first one and then another into the priest, who said, “Fuck,” beneath his breath, and then, “Get on with it,” something wicked and wanting spilling through the cool command of his voice.

Vane wanted to crack the priest open and wring out all his sounds. As he slid a third finger in and spread them wide, he pressed himself more heavily against the priest, whose knees slipped against the bottom of the slick copper tub.

Water geysered around them, spilling more swiftly over the side as the priest struggled against Vane’s pinning grip.

But Vane held him in place long enough to pull his fingers free and use them to guide his cock to that tight, grasping hole.

Without warning, he shoved in, driving with his thighs and back, putting all the strength he could into the thrust.

At almost the same moment, he reached around to stroke the priest’s cock.

With a shout, the priest reared back against Vane, pushing with his arms against the edge of the tub, the great bunch of muscles in his shoulders shifting against Vane’s slick chest as he struggled between taking and being taken.

But the priest could gain no leverage and no traction, and Vane’s weight held him there, pinned between pleasures, driving into him with a savage rhythm that set the water in the tub to sloshing over the sides in a cascade.

Vane squeezed the priest’s cock, tugged harder, growled, “Fuck, you’re perfect,” into the priest’s ear, and the priest came with another shout, enough to shake dust down from the rafters and wake even the drunkest patrons in the bar below.

The knowledge that they were being heard, that Vane had wrenched these public noises out of the stoic priest, made him come with his own groan of release, his teeth fastening savagely on the spot where the tendon across the top of the priest’s freckled shoulder stood out in stark relief as the man strained against another shout, his release only just ebbing.

Vane felt gutted and unsteady and had to rest his head in the hollow between the priest’s shoulder blades, which rose and fell as he sucked in great lungfuls of damp, spice-scented air.

Beneath him, the priest groaned and lowered his head to rest against his forearm, braced along the curve of the tub.

“Christ, Charles,” he said, his whiskey over gravel voice a gratifying wreck. 

“Christ had nothing to do with it, James,” Vane said, pressing an open-mouthed kiss on the knob of Flint’s spine. 

Flint shivered, made a quiet little sound, far gentler than his usual gruff and bluster.

Vane smirked. “Have I broken you at last?”

“As if I’d tell you if you had.”

Vane laughed and at last found the will to move away from Flint’s broad back and powerful thighs. He settled again at his end of the tub, though the water was tepid and only brushed the tops of his thighs now.

Flint stayed where he was for a long moment, and Vane let himself enjoy the rare sight Captain James Flint becalmed in the shallows, unmoving except for that great back rising and falling with his breath.

At last, Flint shifted, turned to ease himself down into what remained of the water, his eyes fixing on Vane’s face.

“Give me a few minutes, and I’ll wipe that smirk off your face,” Flint promised.

Observing the heat in Flint’s eyes, Vane chuckled even as a tendril of desire unfurled in his belly.

“With all the noise you made, the fuckers will be here any minute,” Vane observed. “No priest’s robes will fool them a second time.”

Flint shrugged, smiling wolfishly. “I’ll claim sanctuary.”

“In a whorehouse?” 

Flint nodded, his smile turning mock-serious. “Our Ladies of the Blessed Sacrament are a most sacred and ancient order.”

“Sacrament?” Vane prodded, expecting a deeper jest.

But some strange expression flashed across Flint’s face, easy to miss if Vane weren’t looking so intently at him: Uncertainty, affection, surrender…

Something swooped in Vane’s belly and he held his breath, waiting for words neither of them had ever spoken, too aware of fate’s cruel attention to ever tempt the bitch like that.

“Baptism,” Flint observed, scooping a palmful of water up and letting it pour through his fingers with a pattering sound.

“Communion,” he continued, caressing the tender inside of Vane’s knee with his foot.

“Penance,” he added, with no further indication of his meaning.

Vane cocked an eyebrow.

“Surely, I’ve committed some terrible sin to be stuck with you for the rest of my life,” Flint explained, his smirk widening.

“The rest of our lives?” Vane answered, softly, caught by an image of them as old men sharing a bath and a fuck, an impossible dream, given their profession.

“Such as they are,” Flint conceded, his smile dimming. But when he rose then and stepped out of the tub, he made it a point to walk toward him, not away, naked and wet and powerful even in that state.

He braced his hands on either side of Vane and leaned down to steal his breath with a kiss both passionate and gentle—a rare and precious sacrament, indeed, given the way they usually avoided kissing for its intimations of intimacy.

“Be careful,” Vane said, a ridiculous admonishment given their livelihood and the fact that Flint’s face was posted in every public house in the British West Indies.

Flint drew his blasphemous disguise over his head and bent to retrieve the hemp belt, the vow knots darkened where they’d soaked up the spilled water. 

Vane shivered as Flint’s clever hands tied the belt loosely over his hips. He told himself it was only that the water was cold and rose from the tub as Flint reached the door.

“I’ll see you soon,” Flint said, as if he were staking his honor against being made a liar by fate or time or the men who hunted them.

“Yes, you will,” Vane promised, not bothering to pretend it wasn’t a kind of oath.

Then the door closed, and Flint’s heavy tread receded, and Vane was left alone in a room that smelled of soap and sex, signs of their own kind of worship.


End file.
